I think it’s been a busy Friday, as expected. There was a lot of testing going on in the background during both practice sessions and I’m happy to have tried everything and completed the run plan. Obviously, I’m not so satisfied with the pace, but we expected this here… Now it’s time to work hard tonight and see how to get a bit closer to the top ten.

It was a productive Friday. We gathered plenty of data, important for our knowledge, and we now have a lot of work to do. This track isn’t an easy one for us so we have a bit of a difficult weekend ahead.

At recent races we have under-delivered relative to our expected performance level. As a result, we have invested a lot of today’s running in completing a program to re-test some of the car changes we made just before the summer break. Monza is quite stand-out in terms of wing level and so to give the most representative results looking forward to the rest of the year, a lot of the running today was completed on a wing level which is not perfectly suited to the long Monza straights. The program involved lots of constant speed procedures on track and lots of changes in the garage. The mechanics worked particularly hard to get us through this busy program and the drivers and engineers did a good job to ensure comparable laps. We know coming to Monza that this will be a quite difficult home race for us given our usual straight line rankings and no power unit development with our 2015 engine. However, I hope that the tests completed today will give us a good direction going forwards, even if the data analysis job is very large in the short term and we will need to be in ‘damage limitation mode’ at this event.